(Washington, D.C., July 23, 2013) A new report by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) and other peer-reviewed research published this spring indicate that conserving Greater Sage-Grouse will require both protecting large areas of habitat and making significant changes in land mana gement to reverse population declines of this wide-ranging species. Federal agencies are currently engaged in an unprecedented, West-wide planning process to conserve and restore the species.

“We appreciate the Obama Administration taking on this unprecedented conservation initiative and the tremendous opportunity it offers to create a lasting legacy of protected western landscapes and sustainable management,” said Matthew Kirby of Sierra Club. “The best available science indicates that without the creation of protected areas, grouse populations will continue to decline.”

The new USGS study (Manier et al. 2013), which was commissioned by the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), indicated that preserving large, relatively undisturbed expanses of sagebrush habitat will be important to sage-grouse conservation. The same USGS study assessed threats to priority conservation areas and found that a significant percentage of these areas have already been degraded, and that most of these areas are already affected by multiple stressors that will continue to impact sensitive sage-grouse.

“It remains to be seen how federal planners ensure that large expanses of intact sagebrush habitat will be protected to secure and recover sage-grouse populations, as the USGS report would advise,” said Steve Holmer of American Bird Conservancy. “We are concerned that the first draft plans released as part of the planning process will be inadequate to prevent further declines in sage-grouse populations.”

A study by Copeland et al. (2013) assessing the Wyoming “core area” conservation strategy, which some BLM plans have also adopted, predicted that conservation measures it recommends will reduce the sage-grouse’s population decline, but will not stabilize grouse numbers or provide for the species’ recovery. Another study by Knick et al. (2013) found that sage-grouse appear to need greater protection than provided by the Wyoming core area strategy.

“Sage-grouse are a landscape species, and they need large, protected landscapes to survive,” said Mark Salvo of Defenders of Wildlife. “The federal planning effort is off to a shaky start, but incorporating findings from this new research will help steer the process back on course.”

Sage-grouse require sagebrush-dominated landscapes with minimal levels of anthropogenic disturbance. 99 percent of remaining active sage-grouse leks were in landscapes with less than three percent disturbance within five kilometers of the lek, and 79 percent of the area within 5 kilometers was in sagebrush cover. The Wyoming core area strategy allows for five percent disturbance.

Modeling indicates that the Wyoming sage-grouse core area conservation strategy, fully applied, plus $250 million invested in targeted conservation easements, would slow, but not stop projected sage-grouse population declines in the state. The Wyoming core area policy prohibits or restricts surface occupancy within 0.6 miles of sage-grouse leks, generally limits development to one site per 640 acres, and limits cumulative surface disturbance to five percent per 640 acres in core habitat.

Protecting the isolated pieces of intact and well-functioning sagebrush ecosystems, and improving, mitigating, and restoring less functional ecosystems, if well-informed, coordinated, and wide-ranging, should contribute to reducing the impacts of previous land uses and land-use patterns on current habitat conditions and population trends.

Sage-grouse populations generally rely on large, interconnected expanses of sagebrush to accommodate local migrations and access to seasonal habitats distributed within their inhabited range, and “fragmentation” represents the dissection of large expanses via various mechanisms. The size of a landscape needed to support breeding habitats of an interspersed population (for example, an area with multiple leks spaced less than 6.2 miles [10 kilometers] apart) may exceed 247,000 acres (internal citations omitted).

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American Bird Conservancy (ABC) is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit membership organization whose mission is to conserve native birds and their habitats throughout the Americas. ABC acts by safeguarding the rarest species, conserving and restoring habitats, and reducing threats, while building capacity in the bird conservation movement.